Invisible Women

Weeping Beauty

The princess was very beautiful. This much cannot be disputed. She was so beautiful that her lips were veiled and her eyes shaded and every inch of her skin shrouded with spiderweb curtains. It is said that this princess was so beautiful that any being who saw her would weep until they were sick with dehydration and even then, they could not stop crying.

Now this was a time before medical sophistications like diagnosis and needles so these people and goats and rabbits and lice were doomed to die. For a while, the king’s cavalry tried to transport the more important people, like dukes and dames, to nearby sources of water, but submersion did little other than iron out wrinkled skin, but the discovery of the Fountain of Youth is an entirely different tale. Of course, even this mystical, magical fountain could not save these dukes and dames, but they looked young and particularly pretty, even while rotting.

Only no one suspected the princess for quite a while, at least not publicly. Even after the King and Queen and all the princes and princesses and dukes and dames and ladies and sires were dead, no one wanted to implicate the baby princess. That, they figured, would practically be sacrimonarchal, which was practically sacrilegious, and no one wanted God’s scorning. So the young princess continued to kill all the people who came to care for her, for simply looking at her was a death sentence, and it was only after she had unknowingly caused the death of her entire kingdom and adjacent kingdoms that a young knight suggested that perhaps she was to blame.

So this young knight, being the bravest of young men, volunteered to care for the princess, and after he traveled for weeks to reach her, he knocked on the palace door and used a thick blanket to cover his eyes. He begged the princess to drape a curtain or several curtains over her head until not a single bit of skin was exposed. The princess complained of the excessive heat under all the cloth, but the young knight would hear nothing of it. He said, “Lovely princess, I am immune to your sweet words, but I am not strong enough to survive your beauty, and so I beg you. If you wish to eat today and tomorrow and for the remainder of your life, please, cover your entire body. Do not let even the slightest amount of skin reach my eyes.”

He reached to open the palace door. He knew that she was lethal and yet he desired to see the face that had killed more than a thousand men. He dropped the thick blanket covering his eyes and he began to weep until there was nothing left to him but bone.